Aristotle

Loading

ARISTOTLE, philosopher, psychologist, logician, moralist, political thinker, biologist, the founder of literary criticism—was born at Stagira, a Greek colonial town on the north-western shores of the Aegaean, in 384 B.C. He was the son of Nicomachus, a doctor, belonging to the guild of the "sons of Aesculapius," who had acted as court physician to Amyntas II., the father of Philip of Macedon. We may perhaps attribute to this fact the interest which he afterwards showed in physiological and zoological studies—though it must be admitted that these studies belong to his later years, and were perhaps due less to heredity than to that general passion for detailed enquiry in every direction which marks the later stages of his development. By race he was an Ionian. Stagira had been largely colonized from the Ionic district of Chalcis in Euboea ; his mother was a native of that district; and to it he naturally retired at the end of his life. His Ionic blood has been called in evidence to explain his interest in the facts of nature. It was the Ionian philosophers of Asia Minor who had first investigated "Nature"; and Aristotle, it has been said, "was from first to last an Ionian, an observer of the facts of nature, a man for whom no problem was too detailed to whet his curiosity." But racial characteristics are at the best only dubious explanations; and the development of Aristotle's thought would, perhaps, have equally led him to detailed scientific enquiry if he had been born an Athenian or a Theban.

Life of Aristotle.

The life of Aris totle falls into three clearly marked periods. There is the period of work in the philosophic school of Plato, in the Academy at Athens, which covers the 20 years from the age of i 7 to that of 37
B.c.), and only comes to an end with the death of Plato. There is the period of his Wanderjahre—at Assus, in the south of the Troad ; on the island of Lesbos opposite ; and at the Macedonian court in Pella, some 8om. to the west of Stagira—which covers the dozen years from the age of 37 to that of 49
B.c.), and ends with the majority and accession of his pupil Alexander. Final ly, there is a second period of work in Athens— a period of work on his own account as the head of the Peripatetic school in the Lyceum—which covers, roughly, another dozen years of his life, from the age of 49 to that of 62 (335-322 B.c.), and ends with his retirement to Chalcis and his death. These periods are not only stages in the external course of a life. They are also —it has been contended by Prof. Jaeger in his work on Aristotle— stages in the internal development of a body of thought. The Aristotle of the first period differs from the Aristotle of the last ; and it is thus of the first importance to follow the stages of his life in order to understand the stages, and the progress, of the development of his thought.

I. It must have been the greatest and the profoundest of fac tors in the life of Aristotle that he worked for 20 years by the side of Plato. He came as a disciple—a young disciple of i 7—to sit at the feet of a master who had attained the age of 61 ; but in the course of years he must have become a fellow-worker in the studies of the Academy. The Plato of those years—the grey haired Plato in the evening of a life which reached the age of 8i— was no longer the Plato of the Republic; but he was still, and more than ever, the beloved master of a body of "friends" en gaged together in the pursuit of truth and goodness. His school was now in the stage which is marked by the Theaetetus, the Politicus, and the other dialogues of this period : it had left the Socratic stage, and was occupied with the problems of "ideas" and with the division of "ideas," down and down, until the indivis ible (or, as we say, the individual, by which Plato meant the infima species) was eventually reached. Here was the germ from which grew Aristotle's logic, and from which, again, his metaphysics took its beginning. But the Academy was also engaged in some measure of concrete and scientific study. Mathematics and astronomy were especially cultivated : the Laws of Plato, the work of his old age, presupposes a body of research in legal and constitutional ques tions ; and the study of medicine seems also to have been in some measure pursued. We may guess that Aristotle took his part in these various studies. His sketch of an ideal State in the last two books of the Politics, which may be early, shows a close relation to Plato's Laws. He hardly shared, indeed, in Plato's passion for mathematics ; and he was perhaps always more interested than Plato in biological study. Some scholars have drawn a distinction between Plato the mathematician and Aristotle the biologist. There is a truth in the distinction. Plato's interest in "ideas" found a natural basis in geometrical forms and the abstract rules of numbers : Aristotle's interest in the classification of genera and species led him naturally towards the world of organic nature ; and the emphasis which he came to lay more and more on devel opment ('yiv€o s) accentuated that tendency. Yet it may be con tended that the mathematical knowledge of Plato went little deeper than that of Aristotle; and on the other hand it is easy to exaggerate the importance of the biological element in Aristotle's general system of thought. (See W . D. Ross, introduction to Selections from Aristotle.) What seems to be certain is that there is no proof of any serious division of opinion between Aristotle and Plato during the 20 years of their intercourse. Aristotle re mained one of the circle of "friends" in the Academy throughout that period ; he joined in its researches and possibly its teaching' ; and the dialogues which he wrote during those years—dialogues now lost, but celebrated in antiquity alike for their style and their content—were largely modelled on the style of the later series of Platonic dialogues which begins with the Theaetetus. We may admit, indeed, that in his later dialogues, and particularly in that entitled De Pliilosophia, he diverged from the Platonic doctrine of "ideas" as "separable" from and existing "beyond" individual things; but there is no reason for thinking that this di vergence ever approached the nature of a sharp contention, or was anything more than a friendly difference of opinion. The master and the pupil were undivided when Plato died in 347 ; and the noble words which Aristotle wrote, for an altar of friendship in memory of Plato, attest the depth of the pupil's feeling even after the master's death.

II. On the death of Plato his nephew Speusippus succeeded him as the head of the Academy. Aristotle and another of Plato's pupils, Xenocrates, thereupon left Athens, perhaps believing, as Professor Jaeger has said, that Speusippus was the heir not of the spirit, but only of the office of the master, and perhaps desiring to find a new place for the habitation of the spirit. The place they chose was Assus. There were interesting reasons for their choice. Two old pupils of Plato, Erastus and Coriscus, had taken his teaching back to their native town of Scepsis, on the slopes of Mt. Ida. Here they had come in contact with Hermias, a eunuch, who had perhaps been a banker's clerk, and had thriven suffi ciently to buy mining property near Mt. Ida and eventually to ac quire the title of prince from the Persians and establish himself as "tyrant" in Atarneus, a town to the south-east of Assus. The two Platonists and Hermias had studied together : Plato had written to them the sixth of his Epistles for their guidance ; and Hermias, some time before the death of Plato, had given the town of Assus in gratitude to his two companions in study. To Assus, in this conjuncture of affairs, Aristotle and his fellow-pupil came in order to join the Platonic circle ; and here Aristotle set up a school in which he taught for the next three years. Hermias was among his pupils ; and Theophrastus came from the neighbouring islands of Lesbos to join the company. Two consequences fol lowed. In the first place, Hermias gave his adopted daughter and niece, Pythias, in marriage to Aristotle. In the second place, per haps on the suggestion of Theophrastus, Aristotle moved, about 344 B.C., to the island of Lesbos; and here, in what Prof. Went worth Thompson has called a long honeymoon, he spent two years (344-342 B.c.) largely in the study of natural history, and especially in that of marine biology. But politics, as they had been present in his thought, and probably his teaching, from his first coming to Assus and joining the company of Hermias (we may attribute the beginning of the Politics to this date), con tinued to be present and pressing while he was at work in Lesbos. Hermias seems to have been negotiating about this time with Philip of Macedon, who was already thinking of the crusade against Persia, and might naturally desire a point d'appui on the south of the Dardanelles in the territory of the "tyrant" of Atarneus. It may have been in this way, and in consequence of these negotiations, that Aristotle, the son-in-law of Hermias, was 'Rhetoric was possibly the subject of his lectures; and we may perhaps date the beginning of the Rhetoric in this period.

invited by Philip to come to Pella and continue his teaching there for the benefit of the young Alexander. In 342 he accepted the invitation; and the next seven years of his life (342-335 B.c.) were spent in Macedonia. He had scarcely settled in Pella when he heard the news that Hermias had been seized by the Persians, taken to Susa, tortured and crucified, with the final words on his lips, "Tell my friends and companions that I have done nothing unworthy of philosophy." The news may have helped to inspire Aristotle (who wrote an ode celebrating Hermias, along with Achilles, as a follower of true valour) with anti-Persian feeling; and may have led him to inspire his pupil all the more to follow the way of Achilles' and, as the champion and leader of a united Greece, to lay low the great king of the East. Unfortunately, there is little evidence which bears on Aristotle's work and teaching in Macedonia. Possibly he had a little circle of "friends" (including Theophrastus) with whom he continued his general studies and teaching. We know that he formed a friendship with Antipater and it is this friendship which is one of the chief factors in the last phase of his life.

III.

Even before the death of Philip in 336 Alexander was more Iii. Even before the death of Philip in 336 Alexander was more and more concerned in affairs, and Aristotle must have seen less and less of his pupil. After the accession of Alexander there was nothing to keep him in Macedonia, and he naturally returned to Athens, the intellectual centre of Greece, consecrated for him by the memory of Plato, where he could hope to work quietly under the protection of Antipater, now acting as regent in Macedonia and Greece after the departure of Alexander on his eastern cam paign. His relations with Alexander were now practically at an end. True, his nephew Callisthenes accompanied Alexander to the East : true, he received scientific material from the scientific staff which accompanied the eastern expedition : true, again, he wrote a treatise, "Alexander or on Colonies," which seems to belong to the period of Alexander's foundation of colonial cities in Egypt and Asia. But Callisthenes was done to death by Alexander in 327; and even before that time Alexander had already departed widely from Aristotle's teaching, and had deserted anti-Persian feeling and notions of Greek supremacy for the plan of an empire resting on the equal and harmonious co-operation of Persians and Greeks. In any case the Aristotle of the last 13 years (335-322 B.c.) is an Aristotle immersed in pure science and investigation. Side by side with the Academy (now under Xenocrates, the fellow pupil of Plato who had once followed him to Assus) he set up his own school in the Lyceum—a school which came to be known as the Peripatetic, from the ireptiraros in its garden in which he walked and talked with his pupils. The school was a definite or ganization—a 9tacros, somewhat like a college, which formed a so ciety devoted to the cult of the Muses ; and like a college it had its regular dinners and even its plate. It was furnished with maps and a library : it had something of a staff, and Theophrastus was among its lecturers. The great body of the extant Aristotelian treatises represents the lectures which Aristotle delivered in his school at Athens in the evening of his life—not that they were then all composed for the first time (on the contrary, many of them had grown during the years of wandering, and the extant forms still contain traces of earlier versions and earlier views), but that they were now reduced by Aristotle to the form in which we know them. The range of studies was catholic and indeed uni versal. It is now that Aristotle departs from his master Plato— not so much in altering his theory of "ideas," as in shifting the whole balance of his interest, and in turning from "the heavenly things that are the objects of the higher philosophy" to the de tailed facts of historical and biological process. He leaves 4 Xoeockla, we may say, for iorropta, in that wide sense of the word in which it means the sober registering of recorded fact ; and here he shows himself more Baconian than the Bacon of the No vum Organum. The work of his last years is an encyclopaedia—an encyclopaedia of unique value, in that it proceeds from a single mind informed by a single set of controlling ideas. In the field of human history he produced, on the one side lists of the victors in the Pythian and Olympic games, and a chronology of the Athenian 'One of the first acts of Alexander, after crossing the Dardanelles, was to place a garland on the tomb of Achilles.

drama (which supplemented the Poetics) ; on the other, a record of 158 constitutions (which equally supplemented the Politics), an account of "the customs of barbarians," and a treatise on "cases of constitutional law." In the field of natural history the volume of his production was greater still. It included the His toric Animalium, a record of biological facts, in which the ma terial furnished by Alexander's expedition seems to have been used (as it also seems to have been used in a treatise "on the rising of the Nile") ; it included biological treatises based on these facts ; it included a body of treatises which inaugurated the study of psychology ; and it has been suggested that it also included both a scheme for the history of the sciences (physics—including metaphysics—mathematics and medicine) and researches in med ical subjects such as anatomy and physiology. Exegit monumen tum . . . situ pyramidum altius; and even if some of the steps of the monument are conjectural, we cannot but admire its height and its massive plan.

In 323, in the midst of all these activities, Aristotle received the news of the death of Alexander. Antipater had been sum moned to the presence of Alexander and was absent from Greece ; the nationalist party raised its head in Athens ; and Aristotle fled to his mother's home in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea, where he died in 322 at the age of 62.' By his marriage with the daugh ter of Hermias he had a daughter, also called Pythias ; by a later union he had a son, called according to Greek custom by the name of his grandfather Nicomachus. His personality is hidden behind his works. Tradition makes him speak with a lisp and pay attention to dress. The busts, which seem to be authentic, show firm lips and intent eyes. He was a man of affairs, versed in the ways of courts; and he had at its height the invincible and insati able curiosity of the Greek mind. But there was something more in him than the light of a pure intellect. The study of his life leaves the impression of generous humanity. His will shows him concerned for every relative and dependant, and not least for the emancipation of his slaves. And there is a phrase in an Aristotelian fragment, which may come from a letter of his later years, which cannot be forgotten. "The more I find myself by myself and alone, the more I have become a lover of myth." "Myth" may have meant to Aristotle a little of what revelation has meant to millions in later centuries; and for all his scientific labours he may yet have felt at the last—what indeed he suggests in pas sages of his own treatises—that there was a supreme consolation in the life of contemplation which might lead, at its highest mo ments, to visions of the Divine.

The Writings of Aristotle.

The writings of Aristotle fall into three main kinds. There are literary essays intended for publication, such as the early dialogues (now lost except for fragments) ; there are the set works of his later years, such as the Constitution of Athens (one of the 158 Constitutions which was rediscovered over 3o years ago) ; and above all there are what we may call treatises, intended for use in lectures or for the reading of the students of the Lyceum, of which we possess a large variety.

(I) The dialogues, written with a conscious art and a definite pursuit of style, were modelled on those of Plato; but they are said by ancient writers to have differed from Plato's dialogues in representing different persons as stating at length their different views on the subject treated. They were famed for their lucidity and the easy flow of their style ; they belong to the period of Aristotle's discipleship in the Academy (367-347 B.c.) ; almost to the very last they followed the doctrine of Plato ; and their 'An archaeological discovery, which may bear on Aristotle, was made about 189o. Near Eretria, in Euboea, in an ancient cemetery in which non-residents as well as residents had been buried, there was exhumed from a rich tomb with marble foundations a number of objects—seven gold diadems, two styluses, a pen, a signet ring and a terra cotta statuette of a man in an attitude like that which Christodorus (Anth. Pal., ii.) ascribes to a statue of Aristotle. On a sepulchral stone in the grave was found the inscription, in lettering of the early 3rd century B.C., [B1LoTi [A]p,eroTEXou. The grave may have been connected with the family of Aristotle (though Chalcis is over a dozen miles away from Eretria) ; the styluses, pen and statuette may, in that case, be connected with Aristotle himself ; and a skull which was also discovered may have been his. (See C.I.G., vol. xii., fasc. ix. under Eretria, where references are given to the literature on the subject.) clear and stirring account of Platonic doctrine exercised a large influence in antiquity down to the days of St. Augustine. The two most famous and considerable of these dialogues were the Protrep ticus, an exhortation to the philosophic life, which was a model for Cicero's Hortensius and was partly incorporated by Iamblichus (as Prof. Bywater first recognized in 1869) in a philosophic text book for beginners, also called the Protrepticus, and the De Phil osophia, perhaps the latest of all the dialogues, in which, as we have already seen, Aristotle first showed signs of a movement away from Plato's theory of "ideas." Generally, however, the dialogues of Aristotle were purely Platonic in the range and the substance of their thought ; and several of them, such as the Politicus and the Sophistes, bear the same name and perhaps handled the same theme as Platonic dialogues. If only we could recover the lost dialogue "On Justice," which appears from its title to correspond to Plato's Republic (for the Republic, too, treats of justice, and indeed its alternative title is "On Justice"), it would be profoundly interesting to compare Aristotle's views in this dialogue both with those of his master and with his own later views on the doctrines of the Republic as they are expressed in the second book of the Politics.

(2) Midway between the dialogues and the treatises of Aris totle come a number of works which, like the dialogues, were set compositions in literary form intended for publication, but which, like the treatises, were mainly of the nature of scientific compila tions. Apart from an essay On Monarchy, which may belong to the time of his residence at Pella, these works belong to the third and last period of his life, during which he was occupied in investi gation and teaching in the Lyceum. They include the Alexander, or on Colonies; the accounts of 158 Constitutions; the compila tions of "the Customs of Barbarians" and of "Cases of Constitu tional Law"; the chronological tables of victors in the Pythian and Olympic games ; and a list of the successful dramas produced at the festivals of Dionysus at Athens.

(3) The treatises, as we have seen, were in several cases begun in the period of Wanderjahre from 347 to 335, but in the form in which they have come down to us they belong to the final period between 335 and 322. They were all written by Aristotle in con nection with his courses of lectures—not so much, probably, in the way of "notes," to be followed in the delivery of lectures (the actual lectures may have been more discursive and more of the nature of discussions or conversations with a class), but more in the way of "memoranda," which may have been written after wards, to preserve a record of the main results attained in lec tures and discussions.

The treatises may be grouped under some eight main heads, though we cannot for a moment say that each of these heads cor responds to a separate "course" of lectures, or that the classifica tion is the same as Aristotle himself would have made. The first head is what Aristotle calls "analytics," or, as we should say, logic. Under this head we have some half-dozen treatises (the Categories, the de Interpretatione, the Topics, the Sophistici Elenchi, and the Prior and Posterior Analytics) which came to be known, some centuries afterwards, as the Organon, or "instru ment" of science and scientific reasoning. The second head we may call by the name of "physics," using that term in a wider sense than that in which we use it to-day, and taking it to mean the general study of inorganic "nature" (vacs). Here we have to reckon the treatise on Physics, the De Caelo, the De Genera tione et Corruptione and the Meteorologica. The third head may be termed psychology—of which (as also of logic) Aristotle was the inventor. Under it fall the De Anima and the Parva Naturalia —the latter a collection of essays on subjects such as sensation, memory, sleep and dreams. The fourth head may be called by the name of biology. We have seen that Aristotle was already inter ested in the study of this subject in his Lesbian days, about
B.c., and that he continued his interest and extended his studies in the final period of his life. His biological treatises are the Historia Animalium (a record of data corresponding, in the sphere of natural history, to the record of 158 constitutions in the sphere of politics), and a number of theoretical works, based on the data of the Historia, which include studies of the "parts," the "progression," the "motion" and the "reproduction" of ani mals. Whether or no we regard Aristotle as peculiarly biological in his general point of view and his general approach to the problems of knowledge, we must recognize that it was in the sphere of biology that he made one of his greatest contributions to the advancement of learning.

The remaining heads under which his treatises may be grouped are the metaphysical, the ethical, the political and the literary. Under the head of metaphysics, or "first philosophy," which is an enquiry into the nature of existence (obaia), and involves a dis cussion of the question whether universals exist as substances "separable" from their particulars, we have a composite treatise, containing different strata put together by later editors, which is called the Metaphysics. Under the head of ethics we have two treatises—the Eudemian Ethics (so called from Eudemus, one of Aristotle's pupils), and the Nicomachean Ethics (which derives its name from his son Nicomachus). It is now held that the former is a genuine work of Aristotle, belonging to the middle period of his life, which was subsequently edited by Eudemus, and that the latter is a statement, edited by his son, of his final views on ethics in the last period of his life. (We may remark, however, that even thL Nicomachean Ethics is somewhat simple, not to say elemen tary, in its psychological foundations, and that it shows little con nection with the detailed study of the problems of psychology in the treatises which deal with that subject.) Under the head of politics we have the treatise called the Politics, which falls into three parts—a philosophical "theory of the State" in Books i.–iii.; a detailed study (running into practical suggestions) of the "forms and methods of government" in Books iv.–vi. ; and a torso of a sketch of an ideal State in Books vii.–viii. Opinions differ in regard to the dates of the different parts; but it seems reasonable to believe that the last two books, which show a considerable de pendence on Plato's Laws, are early, and that the three middle books, which go naturally with the collection of 158 Constitutions, and suggest in their method the biological studies of Aristotle's last period, are the latest. Finally, we have to count, under the head of literary criticism, the three books of the Rhetoric and the short treatise, Poetics.

More important than the classification of Aristotle's treatises is the chronology of their composition. Important as it is, it must also remain conjectural. We are justified, however, in saying that Aristotle seems to have moved from an earlier concern with logic and "the higher philosophy of heavenly things" (or, in other words, from the circle of Platonic interests) towards a later and more absorbing passion for the study and record of actual facts alike in the world of "nature" and in the world of political and lit erary "art." On this basis we may assign the first form of a num ber of treatises (which, it is true, must have been expanded later in connection with Aristotle's later lectures) to the period before 335. Among these we may count the Organon, the Physics, the third (and most general) book of the De Anima, the Eudemian Ethics, a considerable part of the Metaphysics, and probably the last two books (with perhaps also the first three) of the Politics. The rest of the treatises we may ascribe to the final period of Aris totle's life.

The Philosophy of Aristotle.

It is impossible, within the space of a brief article, to give any account of Aristotle's teaching on the many specific branches of knowledge with which he dealt ; and the reader is referred to the articles on subjects such as Logic, Ethics and Metaphysics for a more adequate account of the contribution which he made to their development. Here we can only deal with the general development of Aristotle's thought, the general views which run through his treatises, and the particular opinions which have influenced subsequent thought most pro foundly. Starting with a veneration for Plato and an acceptance of the Platonic tradition which lasted almost to the death of Plato and his own middle age, he followed more and more in the last 25 years of his life
B.c.) a peculiar and distinctive method of his own. Plato had studied reality as a whole, and the reality he had studied had been the super-sensible reality of "ideas." Aristotle divided reality into the several spheres of physics, biology, ethics, politics and psychology; and the reality which he studied in these spheres was the observable facts (ra b rapxovra) of actual and concrete individual substances. The essence of his procedure in each field of "enquiry" was obser vation of the data (coupled, in biology at any rate, with experi mental research in the way of dissection, with a view to determin ing the data more exactly) ; and the object of his study was to discover some general theory which, in the Greek phrase, "saved" —or, as we might say, explained without doing violence to them— the data which had been observed. ("The course of exposition," he lays it down in the De Partibus Animalium, "must be, first, to state the attributes common to whole groups of animals, and then to attempt to give their explanation.") Aristotle possessed in a re markable degree the scientific habit of mind ; on the one hand he distinguished the various "sciences" (or, as he would have pre ferred to say, "enquiries"), drawing the lines of division between them and attaching to some of them the names they have since continued to bear; on the other hand he followed a scientific pro cedure in each of the subjects he treated, and within the limits of his technique (he had few instruments at his disposal, and he had to discover for himself the rules of reasoning) he observed the per manent canons of scientific enquiry. If the essence of his method and teaching had been followed, the fruit would have been a great period of scientific investigation and discovery. No nobler exor dium to such a period could be furnished than the great passage in the De Partibus Animalium (642b 22 sqq.), in which he propounds the programme and the justification of a study of Nature. But the essence of his teaching and method was not followed. The reason may partly be that his treatises seem to have been sub merged from the time of his death for over a couple of centuries. According to a tradition of antiquity which may well be accepted, the library and the treatises of Aristotle passed at his death to Neleus, the son of that Coriscus of Scepsis whom he had left Athens to join in 347 B.e.; and they continued in the hands of the descendants of Neleus, apparently neglected and forgotten, until they were recovered for the learned world from the cellar of a house in Scepsis in the time of Sulla (8o B.e.). Destitute of the master's treatises, and rapidly forgetting his spirit, the Peri patetic school hardened into a logical tradition of its own ; and even when the treatises were recovered, they were treated not as incentives to enquiry and further discovery but as a rounded body of complete knowledge (perhaps the last thing that Aristotle would have claimed for his tentative conclusions), on which com mentators might write and lecture as if it contained the final word of perfection. As a spirit and an incentive, Aristotle was dead; he only lived, if indeed it can be called life, as a "master of those who knew" and a corpus scientiae. In this way the great researcher was made the enemy of research ; and this continued to be his fate for century on century. The middle ages, as we shall see, inherited the Peripatetic cult of "the master"; they "made his torch," as Dryden said, "their universal light"; and thus the be ginning of modern science in the i6th century took the form of a revolt against Aristotle—one of the most scientific spirits that ever lived. The life of Aristotle after his death has many of the elements of a tragedy.

But we must return to the real Aristotle who lived and worked in the 4th century B.C. He had a profound respect for given facts, and a deep passion for classifying these facts with a scrupulous respect for their exact character. He was no longer, when he reached the definitely scientific stage of his development, inter ested in "ideas" as they were conceived by Plato ; but he was pro foundly interested in "forms"—in the common attributes which can be observed in the same kind of things, and enable us to classify such things in terms of genera and species. "The principal object of natural philosophy," he wrote, "is not the material ele ments, but their composition, and the totality of the form." The aim of all science, we may say, is to form an intelligible universe by discovering the universal in the particulars—particulars which are the primary and only substances or existences, but which none the less have no existence independently of the universal which is their "form" and makes them the class or kind of existence which they are. Such universals are concepts formed by the intuitive reason on the basis of repeated "sensations," which rise to "mem ory," and then to "experience," of the same kind of thing. By making such concepts we make a world we can understand—the world of knowledge ; and within that world we can reason and use the methods of valid argument. It is one of the greatest services of Aristotle to knowledge that he laid down, and was the first to lay down, these methods, and that he invented the science of logic. There was reasoning before Aristotle, and the dialogues of Plato abundantly imply its methods and rules. But Aristotle was the first to make them explicit ; and the inventor of the syllogism, as he may justly be called, deserves to be celebrated in the annals of human thought.

One of the general views which runs through Aristotle's thought, if it is expressed more particularly in the Physics, is a view which we may call by the name of evolution or libiects. Whether this view was due to his study of biology, or his study of biology was a result and an application of a general view which he had formed on general grounds, we cannot pause to inquire. In any case, a pervading conception of growth is what chiefly distinguishes his thought from that of Plato. Plato had been more deeply inter ested in being than in becoming, which belonged in his view to the deceptive world of fallible sense; and he had tried to interpret true and permanent being in the light of the permanent truths of mathematics, making number the basis of the universe and identi fying matter with space. His universe was thus a static universe. The universe of Aristotle is dynamic ; his world is engaged in be coming; the "nature" of each thing is a potentiality which moves through a process of development (a process which is also "na ture") to an actuality which is true and final and perfect "nature" —for "nature is the end," as he writes in the Politics, "and what each thing is when fully developed we call its nature." There is thus a teleological view behind Aristotle's conception of the nature of things. The movement which he sees incessantly at work is a movement towards an end immanent from the first in the subject of movement, and determining all its growth; "for the proc ess of evolution is for the sake of the thing finally evolved, and not this for the sake of the process." This general conception is applied by Aristotle not only to developments in the sphere of organic nature, but also to constructions in the sphere of human art. The activity of man, whether in the building of a house or the making of a statue, in the putting together of a State or the composition of a tragedy, is the activity of realizing a plan or "form," and of causing a material which has the proper poten tiality—be it wood and stone, or marble, or the human trend to association, or the human passion for imitation—to move towards the "form" which is also its "end." There is thus no distinction between "nature" and "art" in Aristotle's view. They move on parallel lines; they may co-operate. As he says of the State in the Politics, "by nature there is an impulse in all men towards political association, but he who first put them together (6 mrpdros o vQTivas) was the cause of the greatest of benefits." Of all Aristotle's treatises it is perhaps those on ethics and politics (along with that on logic) which have exercised the deep est and most continuous influence on subsequent thought. There have been many who, like Archbishop Laud (St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante might equally have made the confession), have ac knowledged Aristotle as their "master in humanis." The Nico machean Ethics is one of the great books of the world. Its appli cation of the doctrine of the mean to the various virtues ; its theory of the relation between external goods and the inward hap piness of the spirit; its doctrine of habits, and of the importance of the stage of habituation in moral development—all these are among the permanent possessions of human thought. We may reckon in the same category what Aristotle says of the life of contemplation (which is "a laying hold on immortality as far as is possible for men") and what he writes of the connection be tween "leisure" (an activity to be distinguished alike from
and from "amusement") and the contemplative life. The Politics, if it has not all the qualities of the Ethics, has furnished the gen erations with many of the great axioms of political truth. That "the State is by nature" (which does not prevent it from also being "by art") ; that it exists for the good life, if it begins for the sake of life only; that law is the true sovereign of States, and governments are servants of law; that there is a fundamental difference between the lawful monarch and the tyrant who gov erns by his arbitrary will; that there is a right inherent in the people, in virtue of their capacity of collective judgment, to elect their rulers and call them to account—these are some of the axioms on which men have argued from century to century. Here, and in this example, we can see a service which Aristotle—schem atized and glossed and ossified as he might be in the teaching of the schools—none the less continued to render for generation on generation. He supplied the great "topics" of thought—the themes for discussion and the standard "commonplaces" on these themes; and he supplied, too, a terminology in the grooves of which thought could run. When thought had to be rebuilt after the collapse of classical civilization, and while the middle ages were toiling at the work, it was no small thing that men should have the tools of a terminology and the rules of accepted axioms.

The History of Aristotle's Writings and Philosophy.— The tradition of Aristotle was continued—and forgotten, perhaps, even more than it was continued—in the Peripatetic school. But it never affected classical antiquity so deeply as the tradition of Plato, which—whether it was fused, as by Posidonius of Apamea, into an eclectic philosophy which also included Stoic theory, or was exaggerated, as it was by the Neoplatonists, into a sort of mysticism—continued to be a magnet to ancient thought. It is in the thousand years that lie between the collapse of ancient civilization in the 5th century and the beginning of the classical Renaissance in the 15th that the influence of Aristotle is strongest and most diffused. It was the logic of Aristotle which for more than half of this period (from 500 to 1200 A.D.) was alone known in the West ; and not only so, but down to the beginning of the 12th century it was only the earlier and more elementary parts of the Organon which were known and studied. Even this was only studied in a Latin translation and commentary made by Boethius; and indeed the study of Aristotle through the whole of the middle ages was the study of Aristotle in a Latin version, and not in the original Greek. But the Latin version of the first half of the Organon was none the less a considerable instrument of education for many centuries. It was the staple of "dialectic," one of the three subjects of the mediaeval Trivium; and as dialectic was the subject of all others which set students effectively thinking, we may say that Aristotle was in this way the chief influence, outside theology, in the educational system of the early middle ages. His logical treatises were studied, century by century, in the chapter schools attached to cathedrals and in the schools of the Bene dictine monasteries; and along with "grammar" and "rhetoric," the other two subjects of the Trivium, they were the discipline of thousands of students.

A new epoch begins in the 12th century. In the first place, the methods of dialectic, no longer studied merely as a discipline in schools, begin to be applied to problems of theology; and already in Berengar of Tours (c. 1 o; o A.D.) we find Aristotelian logic brought to bear on the problem of transubstantiation. The appli cation of logic to theology became still more evident when Ros celin, William of Champeaux, and, above all, Abelard began to ventilate theories about the nature of universals and to draw their theories to theological consequences. The old difference between Platonic "ideas" and Aristotelian "forms" re-emerged in the field of theology; and conceptions of the nature of God were made to depend on the difference. In the second place, about 1130, the whole of the Organon became known to the West and began to be studied there; and before the middle of the 12th century Otto of Freising had come to Paris, as he tells us, to study the subtleties of Aristotelian logic in the later and profounder Analytics as well as in the earlier treatises of the Organon. Finally, somewhere about 117O, the University of Paris came into existence as an organized body ; and with the foundation of the mediaeval univer sity the great cadre was provided in which the whole body of Aristotelian writings might find a place, and in which, as soon as they had found their place, the great attempt might be made— the attempt which we call by the name of scholasticism—to recon cile their tenets and their secular wisdom with the revelation of the Bible and the divine wisdom of the Fathers of the Church.

In the course of the 13th century, between 1200 and 1270, the general body of the Aristotelian writings other than the Organon (the Physics, the Metaphysics and the De Anima; the Politics and the Ethics) began to be imported into the University of Paris, the University of Oxford, which had arisen at the same time, and the University of Cambridge, which had arisen a little later. It was from Cordova and Constantinople that the new knowledge of the works of Aristotle was derived; and the process of the trans mission of his various writings to the Latin West is one of the curiosities, and one of the romances, of the history of learning.

Cordova in the 12th century was the great seat of Arabic learn ing. Arabic learning had included, since about 800 A.D., the study of the Aristotelian treatises, and especially of those which dealt with physics, metaphysics and psychology. The tradition of Aris totle had survived among the Syrians, and the Arabs had acquired the tradition in Syria when they conquered the country in the 7th century. Great Aristotelian commentators had arisen among the Arabs—especially Ibn-Sina (Avicenna, q.v.), who lived in the East and died at Hamadan in 1037, and Ibn-Roshd (Averroes), who lived in Arabic Spain and died at Cordova in 1198. The Arabic paraphrases and commentaries began to penetrate into the Latin West towards 1200, partly across the Pyrenees, and partly by way of Palermo, the half-Arabic capital of Sicily, in which the emperor Frederic II. was a patron of science and literature. They came in a curious form—the form of Latin translations (which sometimes sank to the level of transliterations, and sometimes were not even made directly, but only from an intervening Hebrew version) of Arabic exegesis, which itself was not based on the original Greek, but rested on Arabic versions of Aristotle, which might rest in turn on Syriac versions of the original text. Not only did they come in a curious form, but they also brought curious views of Aristotle's doctrines, which had suffered a change in the course of their wanderings; and Aristotle would hardly have recognized as his own the idea, which the Arabs had extracted from the De Anima, that the mortal soul of man was re-absorbed at death into the universal creative soul (vows trot rucos) of the Universe. With their curious form and their dubious views the Aristotelian treatises which the West received from the Arabs were at first suspect ; their study was at one time prohibited by the Papacy, which frowned on the fisica et meta fisica; but they won their way, and established their place in study. A school of "Averroists," which lasted until the 16th century, drew its inspira tion from these writings.

Constantinople supplied the West with a more sober and recog nizable Aristotle. It had been captured by the Latins during the fourth Crusade (1204) ; and Latin clergy had settled in the By zantine empire. They had learned Greek : they had found Greek manuscripts; and two of them (both Dominicans), William of Moerbecke in Flanders and Henry of Brabant, translated, under the impulse of the great Dominican scholar St. Thomas, and in collaboration with him, many of the writings of Aristotle (126o- 5270). It was mainly in this way that St. Thomas learned the Aristotle on whom he wrote commentaries and whose views he sought to co-ordinate with Christian revelation in the great edifice of his Summa. In the writings of St. Thomas, Aristotle the ency clopaedist, 1,600 years after his death, was wrought upon by an other great and massive encyclopaedist, who sought to inform the sum of ancient knowledge with the spirit of Christian faith ; and the Pagan scholar, who had built his own great monument, was incorporated by a Christian thinker into another of the great and enduring monuments of human knowledge.

By 1300 Aristotle is the acknowledged "master of those who know." He is "the philosopher" of Dante, whose views run through the De Monarchia, appear in the exegesis of the poems of the Vita Nuova, and are part of the texture and framework of the Divina Commedia. The empire of Aristotle lasted for two centuries. It passed with the Italian Renaissance, which was Pla tonic rather than Aristotelian ; it passed with the German Refor mation, which, by the mouth of Luther, denounced the "Aris totelianism" of the schoolmen ; it passed with the beginnings of modern science, which, seeking to escape from mediaeval tradition and dogma, in which Aristotle had been incorporated, left Aris totle aside, and neglected the deep and genuine science of his writings because it had been yoked with what they sought to escape. Only in the later 19th century, with the development of biological study, has Aristotle the scientist—the student of biology and the prophet of growth—been once more recognized; and only in our own day is the development of his mind, and the growth of his philosophy of nature, beginning to be understood in terms of his own doctrine of "evolution." BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The works of Aristotle in Greek are in the fiveBibliography.-The works of Aristotle in Greek are in the five volumes of the great Berlin edition (1831-7o) , which includes an excellent Index Aristotelicus. There are editions of the various treatises in the Teubner series of texts. The Oxford translation of The Works of Aristotle, ed. J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross, still in progress, includes a great number of the treatises. A volume of Selections in English has been published by W. D. Ross (Oxford Univ. Press, 1927) . The Greek commentaries on Aristotle have been published at Berlin in 23 volumes, with three volumes of Supplementum Aristotelicum, 1882-1909. Edi tions by modern scholars of separate treatises are the following: T. Waitz, Organon, (Leipzig,.
; J. Prantl, Physics (Leipzig, 1854) ; H. H. Joachim, De Generatione et Corruptione (Oxford, 1922) ; W. Ogle, De Partibus Animalium (London, 1882) ; R. D. Hicks, De Anima (Cambridge, 1907) ; W. D. Ross, Metaphysics (Oxford, 1024) ; J. Burnet, Ethics (London, 1906) ; W. L. Newman, Politics (Oxford, 1887-1902) ; J. E. Sandys, The Constitution of Athens (London, 1912) ; E. M. Cope and J. E. Sandys, Rhetoric (Cambridge, 1887) ; I. Bywater, Poetics (Oxford, 1909).